Top 5 Digital Marketing Metrics

Salesforce’s latest “State of Marketing” report contains the results of a survey of 5,000 professional marketers. You can read the full report here (registration required), but one answer we were particularly interested in was “Top 5 Digital Marketing Metrics for Success”.

From the 5,000 sets of results, SalesForce found the top 5 most common ‘success’ metrics were as follows:

In case that’s too small, the 5 most important digital marketing metrics for success were reported as:

Revenue growth (32%)

Customer satisfaction (30%)

Return on investment (23%)

Customer retention rates (23%)

Customer acquisition (23%)

Satalytics measures four of the five metrics, but we were particularly glad to see that almost a third of respondents rated ‘Customer Satisfaction’ as a top success metric, second only to revenue, and fairly far ahead of ROI, Retention, and Customer Acquisition. Satalytics measures 4 of the top 5, but generally it is ‘Satisfaction’ that is a key opportunity area in

Alongside this they noted there’s a general shift toward customer satisfaction metrics. There are lots of possible reasons for this, but three we find when talking to people are:

‘Customer centricity’ has grown as a concept over the last few years. You can measure this to an extent with retention rates, and general ‘gut feel’ indicators, but systematically measuring customer satisfaction is the single best thing you can do to move toward being customer centric.

Increased competition (often caused by the abundance of supply generated by the web) means businesses often now need to compete, and differentiate themselves, in areas other than product features, price, and legacy relationships. Again, ‘satisfaction’ is a big differentiating factor.

The other 4 metrics listed above (revenue, roi, retention, acquisition) all tell you what happened historically; ‘satisfaction’ is a slightly more forward-looking metric. Satisfied customers are – all things being equal – far more likely to repurchase from you, and to share your brand with friends/colleagues than unsatisfied customers. In other words, positive satisfaction can lead to future revenue, future ROI, future retention, future acquisition.

It’s worth reading the full SalesForce report if you have time (report here, registration required), but we’re also interested in any other big pros/cons of Customer Satisfaction metrics, and whether you believe it should be a ‘top 5’ Digital Marketing Success Metric.